1. Is a plastic bin 12 inch by 24 inch large enough for 5000 meal worms for start up?

2. Will I have enough meal worms to sell a few if I am planning on giving some to the chickens only on weekends?

3. I read somewhere about people developing allergies to meal worms. Has anyone experienced this? I am planning on keeping the bin in the corner of my kitchen but now I am not so sure.

1. For that number of worms, I'd divide them into 2 or 3 tubs rather. They don't do well when overcrowded and once they start breeding, their numbers are going increase substantially, so rather have a bit more space available for them.

2. Each female beetle lays approximately 275 eggs in her lifetime. If you get roughly 50/50 females and males from your start-up 5,000, give or take some losses.. Do the math Leave your first worms in the tubs and let them go through their complete lifecycle. It will take approximately 5 months before you will have worms enough to start selling. If you keep them comfortably warm, they'll go through the cycle quick.

3. I've been farming them on a fairly large scale for a year now and don't wear any protective clothing when I work with them. No allergies yet (touching wood). It is possible though.

Here is a long-running thread on mealworm farming with a lot of good info that I think you'll enjoy:

“Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”

“Listen to the mustn'ts, child. Listen to the don'ts. Listen to the shouldn'ts, the impossibles, the won'ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me... Anything can happen, child. Anything can be.”

I used ice cream tubs with a hole cut out of the center of the lid for air while the edge prevented worms from crawling out. I also separated the pupae into a separate tub and moved the beetles to a new tub with baby cereal and powdered milk (we were feeding lizards so this was recommended) so they would lay their eggs and the worms would develop together in a new tub. We used potatoe slices for moisture and I would soak them in water first so they would last longer. By the time the beetles all died the worms were growing nicely. The older the tub was the bigger the worms and the more pupae would develop. We actually did experiments to determine te exact time for each stage but I don't remember except that I think the beetles only live 4 months.

I had started with just one tub but the worms will eat the pupae and the beetles will eat the worms so we just used a strainer to sift out anything non-worm that would not fit through the holes. It was pretty low maintenance. I still have the tubs on a shelf next to my furnace (which is in a closet with the water heater so it is nice and warm and also dark) but we stopped raising mealworms when we stopped keeping lizards. I wanted to learn to freeze dry them for the birds but it did not seem necessary since they forage for live bugs and earthworms in the yard.

Our colony was started from just one small container of worms from the pet store and we sold surplus tubs of worms quite a few times. I had been raising roaches and I tried crickets briefly but the mealworms were so easy and they reproduced so effectively that I quit raising roaches and failed with the crickets.

The superworms won't work but you don't want to feed them to birds because apparently they can eat their way back out. You can refridgerate the mealworms to slow down their development but we just let them go onto the pupae stage and hatch beetles in order to start over again. Sometimes you can find free beetles and start that way because people buy the worms and don't feed them fast enough. Only the worms will survive being refridgerated while the superworms will not so if you get a starter container of worms from the cold section at the pet store you know they are not superworms.

When we raised hedgehogs I got a 5 gallon bucket of superworms since they chew them up so they can't eat their way out but I did not trust the lizards to chew them enough so we used the regular mealworms for them. It was easy enough to sift out the biggest worms when we pulled out the pupae using the strainer.Edited by Duck Drover - 8/28/16 at 2:56am